Running Google Chrome on FreeBSD

Since Google Chrome just recently launched and it unfortunatly only supports Windows I felt a little bit dissapointed. But hey that doesn’t stop me so easy. So i decided to check out what wine (a windows api emulator for linux and FreeBSD) could do for me.

So i downloaded chrome and tried to run ChromeSetup.exe with wine. No success, wine whined about a windows sytem call regarding http not implemented. So i googled around a bit and noticed that that call was implemented in the latest wine… Did i run the latest wine? no…

Yesterday I mentioned that Google Chrome is released under the BSD License. Oliver suggested (in the comments) that the EULA is very restrictive and Chrome cannot be ported to FreeBSD. Google has changed the EULA now after a storm of protest. Ars Techica concludes that since Chrome is released under the BSD license, the EULA is unenforceable.

It’s worth noting that the EULA is largely unenforceable because the source code of Chrome is distributed under an open license. Users could simply download the source code, compile it themselves, and use it without having to agree to Google’s EULA. The terms of the BSD license under which the source code is distributed are highly permissive and impose virtually no conditions or requirements on end users.

Whatever the license restrictions, Chrome is open source and I’m sure the Wine team will get it to run without major hickups soon.

But there is more: I don’t like this keylogger (omnibar – yes you can deactivate it) and I don’t really like the user id for every installation (it’s not so easy to deactivate it). Look for client_id in \AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data\Local State

Of course the EULA has been rewritten (in Germany e.g. without any real consequence), but there is more to it than meets the eye. Well I try almost every new technology and there are of course nice parts in Chrome, but in the end I don’t trust in Google. I’m using the search, but I don’t like to work with the ‘Googleverse’ ;-)